Virtual environment is often used to deploy production environment so it important to find a good management tool. There are all kinds of official virtual machine managers from virtualization vendors. Some server companies like Synology, will also provide their virtual machine managers.
In the following sections, you will know all kinds of virtual machine managers from different virtualization vendors.
Virt-Manager
Virt-manager is also called Red Hat Virtual Machine Manager. It is primarily developed for KVM virtual machine management but later development makes it also support Xen and LXC virtual environments management.
Virt-manager is a desktop application. You can easily create and edit virtual machine with it. On the right of VM list, VM CPU usage, Host CPU usage, Memory usage, etc. are graphically presented so it will be easy to monitor the hardware resource utilization in virtual environment.
ESXi client and vCenter
VMware is the most popular virtualization solution in the world. It provides very convenient management tools for users.
For private users, like VMware Workstation users, the VMware Workstation client is the management tool. It is a type-2 hypervisor so users can directly manage virtual machines with it.
For enterprise users, like VMware vSphere, the hypervisor is ESXi, a type-1 hypervisor, and users can manage ESXi hosts and VMs via the ESXi client. Unlike VMware Workstation, ESXi client is often visited by web console.
Except for ESXi client, vSphere users can also use vCenter to manage multiple ESXi hosts and use many advanced features like vMotion.
Hyper-V Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Hyper-V is another mainstream virtualization solution developed by Microsoft. It is often used with Windows Server operating system. Although it requires Windows operating system installed on server, it is still regarded as type-1 hypervisor. You can directly enable Hyper-V features on Windows server.
Hyper-V virtual machine can be created and managed by Hyper-V Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, SCVMM.
Hyper-V Manager is often enabled together with Hyper-V feature. You can search this feature in Windows search bar to open it. With Hyper-V Manager, you can create and delete virtual machines, take VM snapshot (it is called checkpoint in Hyper-V Manager), export entire virtual machine, etc.
SCVMM is part of the System Center suite, which can help add, provision, and manage Hyper-V and VMware virtualization hosts and clusters.
What's more, Microsoft also releases many Hyper-V disaster recovery tools like Windows Server Backup, System Center Data Protection, Hyper-V Replica.
XenCenter and Xen Orchestra
XenServer and XCP-ng are both Xen-hypervisor-based virtualization solutions. XCP-ng comes from XenServer as the open-source version of XenServer. There are the management tools, XenCenter and Xen Orchestra, for them.
XenCenter is often installed on Windows operating system and is a desktop application. It provides all kinds of wizards to help users finish all the procedures like VM creation, deletion, migration, etc.
Xen Orchestra has many similar features to XenCenter and is often installed on Linux operating system. It has better performance in VM backup and migration than XenCenter.
Backup and migrate virtual machine with Vinchin Backup & Recovery
The mainstream virtual machine manager can let you easily create virtual machine and monitor the performance of virtual environment but it you want to build a highly efficient disaster recover system, you need Vinchin Backup & Recovery.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a very powerful backup system for virtual environment. You can deploy it for multiple virtual environments including VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer), Oracle Linux KVM, etc.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery supports agentless backup so you just need to add hosts to the backup system and then you can select VMs on the hosts to backup.
To help decrease unplanned downtime, Vinchin Instant Recovery technology will let you recover a failed VM of any size from its backup in 15 seconds.
Vinchin Backup & Recovey also allows you to move VM between different platforms like moving VM from XenServer to VMware to find better environment for applications and better manage heterogeneous virtual environment.
You can easily start with this brilliant backup system because it offers a user-friendly web-based console. Just click the button to get the installation package and start a 60-day full-featured free trial.
Sum Up
Virtual environement is used in many companies and IT administrators need a proper virtual machine manager to manage the virtual environment. In this post, the official virtual machine managers from different virtualization vendors are introduced so IT administrators can find the proper one for the specific virtual environment.
For virtual environment backup, the better choice is Vinchin Backup & Recovery because it provides many powerful features that virtual machine managers haven't provided. Don't miss the free trial.
